💾 Archived View for gemini.circumlunar.space › ~solderpunk › gemlog › do-you-even-compute-bro.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 15:55:38. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Personal computing, broadly construed in such a way that it includes smartphones and tablets and whatnot - basically, computing done on a single-user device which is the personal property of the person doing the computing - has never been bigger than it is today. The average person owns more personal computers, buys personal computers more frequently, and spends more time using a personal computer than even a lot of hardened computing enthusiasts would have ten years ago. This is not just more common and more socially accepted than it used to be, it is, in a weird and quite rapid reversal of social norms, socially *expected*, to the extent that now you're a social misfit weirdo if you *aren't* on a computing device all the time.
It follows from all this that the modern average person must do an awful lot of computing, right?
Right?
Many people will say "Yes, that's right, by definition. Anything you do on a computer is computing and I won't engage in any kind of silly No True Scotsman argument to the contrary, you tedious bore!". That's fair enough, and if you really feel strongly like that you probably want to stop reading right here, because in the rest of this post I'm going to attempt a vague partition of things people do on computers into "intrinsic computation" and "incidental computation", This whole line of thought has fallen out of my ongoing efforts to grapple with the issue of sustainable computing, permacomputing, whatever we're calling it.
One possibly quite informative way to get at what ordinary people do with the "supercomputer in their pocket", as smartphones are so often called these days, is to look at the long list of devices, services and institutions which they have more or less replaced. Twenty years ago, the average Western household contained or consumed at least one and possibly multiple instances of most of the items on the list below:
(I construe "television" here to mean not just a large screen pointed toward a couch, but a thing that actually receives images remotely via radio or cable)
Nothing in this list is completely extinct, but they are all strongly marginalised compared to twenty or even ten years ago. It would not be difficult to find an affluent Western household which contained literally zero of these things in their prototypical forms. Many people still using the above things regularly are either collectors or enthusiasts doing something the average person feels no special affinity for, or else are using them more out of some kind of necessity rather than desire. For every one such person, there are many who own none or almost none of these things and will happily and confidently assert that they are obsolete, and that they have replaced *all* of these things with a *single* device, or a small number of very similar devices. That device will be something that almost anybody will happily admit is a personal computer.
So we've used what we'd all happily call computers to replace all of those things above. But how many of replaced things are themselves things we'd all happily call a kind of computer? How many of the tasks those things achieve are tasks we would happily call computational task? Aside from the calculator, probably none. Heck, some of the things on that list are purely mechanical! And many of the electronic devices once existed as purely analogue devices, with no bits or bytes in sight, no processors, no memory. Of course, mechanical computers exist, and analogue computers exist, too. But most people wouldn't call a typewriter a mechanical computer or a transistor radio an analogue computer. These things aren't computers, and they're not doing computational tasks. Maybe I'm late to the party here, but I have honestly only just recently come to appreciate the sheer extent to which the following is true:
The dominant use of personal computers in the 21st century is the functional simulation of non-computers.
In retrospect, this feels obvious. It explains, perfectly, why personal computing went from being something that most people only did at work to playing a central role in daily life only after and almost immediately after computers starting being connected to the internet 24/7 and having cameras, microphones and speakers built right into them. Modern personal computing is first and foremost about communication and about multimedia, which is what pre-PC consumer appliances were also first and foremost about.
This is obvious in retrospect, but when the penny dropped, I was shocked. *This* is what ubiquitous personal computing has brought us? Okay, we can solve all those communication and multimedia problems with one small, light, robust, portable device instead of twenty big heavy fragile electromechanical contrivances, we can do it faster, we can do it with higher fidelity, we can do it with less power consumption (sure as heck not less embedded energy, but we'll get to that), and it's cheaper and more accessible and access is more democratised. Those things sure aren't nothing, and they're not bad things in and of themselves, but...really? This is it? Shouldn't computers be being used for all kinds of amazing really qualitatively different things that we couldn't imagine before they came along? We are talking, after all, about thinking machines! Electronic brains! Computers are a fundamentally new kind of machine, they do something that non-computers don't do, something we had to invent brand new formalisms to properly reason about. Surely it isn't asking too much to expect them to deliver something genuinely, ground-breakingly new? What happened to bicycles for the mind?!
Of course it's not true that computing has not impacted the average person's daily life. It has, and it does. Every time you check the weather forecast you are consuming the output of a supercomputer! A real one, not the glorified thin-client in your pocket. And computers model the climate and pandemics and economies and demographics for us so we can have better situational awareness about our world and make more informed decisions. And computers design more aerodynamic shapes than any unaided human engineer could conceive of. And so much more beside this. We really *are* living in the computer age. But the computing that has impacted us most happens far away, in universities and government institutions and corporate R&D labs. It's done by specialists, professionals. It's not personal computing. It's not in our homes. We are not active participants.
If most people have nothing better to do with a personal computer than simulate non-computers on it, how did we end up in a world where some of the richest and most powerful companies in the world are in the personal computer business? I think the answer is pretty simple: we live in a world where there is a tremendous, overwhelming demand for the ability to exchange text and sound and images and videos and interactive multimedia experiences with people far away from us. If you respond to that demand and you optimise your solution for minimum size, minimum weight, minimum energy consumption, minimum manufacturing costs, maximum speed, maximum fidelity, maximum device convergence, and, if you're cynical enough, maximum ability of device manufacturers to control or restrict the abilities of device users, then personal computers and 24/7 high-speed, low-latency global computer networks fall out naturally.
But the computing that goes on as a result of that optimisation isn't "intrinsic computing". It's "incidental computing". A thought experiment makes this clear: suppose that tomorrow, personal ownership by private individuals of devices with more than 1,000 transistors in them is outlawed. Smartphones and tablets as we know them become impossible. How do Apple and Google and friends respond to this? Do they embark on a huge, long, expensive project to design and mass produce hyper-miniaturised versions of Konrad Zuse's electromechanical relay computers or Charles Baggage's purely mechanical analytic engines, and then port iOS and Android to those clicking, whirring new platforms? Or do they instead abandon the computational substrate entirely and use modern material science and highly automated, miniature manufacturing technology to build a new generation of souped-up analog consumer appliances which, while not as good as what we are used to in 2023, are likely still considerably better than what we had in 1993? Which of these two courses of action do you think is the most likely to produce a viable commercial product in the least time at the lowest cost? These are rhetorical questions; the first option is obviously absurd, a fool's errand, and the second option wins: computing would be discarded as soon as it stopped bringing practical benefits. Our everyday digital devices really are only incidentally computers. We don't build them as computers because we all need to automatically and accurately process large quantities of data according to specified sets of rules every day, we build them as computers because digital microelectronics are really small and quiet and run cool and you can smack 'em around a bit and let them get dusty without it mattering too much (those are not properties of computers in general!). Meanwhile, the scientists and the engineers, if the transistor limit were extended to them, might actually take the Neo-Zuse-Babbage gambit, because a lot of their work isn't practical without it. Their work is intrinsically computational.
The starting point for any kind of really serious sustainable computing movement has to be to look at what people are actually doing with computers, and figure out which of those things can and can't be done "well enough" in a more sustainable way if we do them without computers at all. If we try to address the tremendous demand for long-distance, high-speed communication and multimedia exchange as best we can by optimising not for all the stuff listed earlier, but instead for maximum device lifespan, maximum repairability, maximum recyclability, minimum embodied energy, minimum supply chain length, and maximum user autonomy, there might still be some use cases where personal computing provides the best solution. But I suspect that for a great many of them, general purpose computers will start to look like square pegs in a world of round holes. In which case, we should gleefully abandon them! And apply ourselves then to the question of how best to design and build and use computers specifically for that subset of tasks where they are indispensable - which might be very differently to how we'd do it when just attempting to replicate the status quo.
I could be quite wrong about the square peg thing. Maybe computers really can still maximise that very different utility function better than non-computers can. And one can also argue that as long as there's just one single lonely use case where computers win, then everybody's gonna have them anyway, and then in that context adding additional non-computers into the mix for other use cases can only increase the overall footprint. I'm not 100% sure that argument is bulletproof, but it's not easily dismissed, either. Even if I am wrong, I bet that the kind of personal computing that emerges from maximising sustainability looks quite different from the kind that emerges from maximising what essentially boils down to convenience.
Because I'm publishing this via Gopher and Gemini, it's going to be read predominantly by "computer people", and a lot of computer people are going to instinctively react negatively to me characterising personal computing as being "just" about communication and multimedia. Yeah, sure, I agree, Lisp and FORTH are divinely beautiful intellectual constructs, code is poetry, generative computer art (the kind where the artist writes the code, not these trendy pre-packaged "AI" things everybody is talking about) lets humans express their inner thoughts and feels in ways they couldn't even dream of without computers, and all that stuff is deeply, undeniably intrinsically computational. I really get it! I'm one of you. But we have to realise and accept that when considering the destructive ecological footprint of the modern computing landscape, *that* kind of personal computing is a tiny fraction of a percent of the whole. To a first order approximation, nobody on Earth does that kind of computing. That's not to say it has no meaning or value, I really believe it does. That kind of stuff is good for the soul, if you have the right kind of soul. But making that kind of computing sustainable is barely even a difficult problem. If that kind of computing is your thing, you can have a lifetime of fun playing with discarded junk from the 80s! Heck, here's a flippant final remark: the idea that that kind of computing would ever be everybody's thing, as opposed to the thing of a very small group of very weird people, is itself a largely discarded idea from the 80s - writing the "Orphans of Commodore" companion to "Orphans of Netscape" is left as an exercise to the reader. :)
adiabatic reckons I've understimated just how much mind-cycling people do. Maybe I have exaggerated by writing it off as a rounding error. I still don't think it's as much as 10% of computing, especially not when weighted by power consumption rather than time. I agree that it's a lot more common at work than at home, even work that's not science/engineering as mentioned above. If I remember rightly, Jobs' original "bicycle for the mind" talk did talk pretty explicitly at times about "worker productivity", so personal computing at work is fairly within scope. I have been thinking mostly in terms of private use at home, but to be fair to adiabatic I barely even tried to make that explicit in the above.